Last week, for the fifth consecutive year, the NFL (National Football League) held a football game in London, and once again Britannia Row Productions provided live audio for the event to the 86,000 crowd inside Wembley Stadium, utilizing Audinate Dante technology distributed audio to the sound reinforcement system.

An event of this magnitude incorporates large amounts of media, ranging from the pre-game show to video feeds, replays, referee microphones, PA announcements, and live satellite linkups to other games in the league.

The home stadiums of NFL teams are designed with this in mind, but as a soccer venue, Wembley Stadium is equipped to meet different demands. As a result, additional infrastructure is required to deliver the production needs of a regular season football game, incorporated with the fixed installation already in existence.

System engineer Sergiy Zhytnikov explains,“Signal distribution around the field was achieved using Dante-linked Lab.gruppen LM 26 and LM 44 processors. A total of 14 of these units were deployed for the game.”

“The use of fiber optic cabling to deliver both Dante audio and control remotely gave real benefit instead of using 2000 meters of analog cabling, which due to necessity was placed in cabling conduits at field level, along with every other kind of electrical cable imaginable,” he adds.

Dante also solved the problem of signal degradation over long distances. “Using Dante on the Lab.gruppen platform is reliable, presents an easier control system is faster to connect and remove, and most importantly, delivers higher quality audio,” Zhytnikov says.

These sentiments were echoed by veteran front of house engineer Roger Lindsay: “This was the cleanest audio distribution system we’ve ever used for an NFL game weekend.”

Lindsay went on to comment that he had received some very positive feedback from the visiting NFL production team on the smooth running of the event and the continual improvements in delivery of this complex task.